Tuesday, July 5, 2016

White (Teacher) Fragility Is Racial (Student) Violence


If you ever want to witness racism, watch the reactions of white teachers in an urban school when a student is killed.

When one of my former students was killed last year, I was devastated. I hadn't seen him in almost two years, but it felt like yesterday that he had proudly shaken my hand at graduation or embraced me when I returned from the hospital a few weeks prior.

The student was Latino and the responses that I heard from my (white) coworkers included statements such as: "I felt bad until I looked at his Facebook page", "What did he expect", and "Well, that's what happens when you're a gangbanger".

Regardless of the choices a student makes and regardless of the socioeconomic conditions of centuries of genocide that has shaped communities of color to this day, I think it should be pretty obvious to that when a minor dies, you should at least give some time before you espouse anything remotely negative. It's just basic human dignity- unless that person is black or brown.

Amelia Shroyer's post generated much discussion. Write fragility can be exemplified with the violent responses to the very concept of white privilege including the following:


What is utterly terrifying is that not only could someone write this, but many adamantly believe that these statements are true.

White fragility can be defined as "a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress be- comes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation."

Nothing epitomizes white fragility more than the call to fire Jesse Williams after his speech at the BET awards.  This is a reactionary move by those who benefit from a racist system as a repudiation of the acceptance of those benefits.

Sadly, I have witnessed such behaviors amongst teachers. One teacher I previously worked with constantly asserted the need for colorblindness, one of the most common forms of white fragility. He was constantly talking about how we should look at our differences and not our similarities. I bit my tongue; the mothers of Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and Eric Garner did not have that privilege of pretending that "we're all the same." We are not, and trying to prop up this illusion under the guise of "equality" is intrinsically oppressive. The same instructor would quote Dr. King in saying that we should be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. Misappropriating quotes such as these is twisting the narrative to benefit whites and to attempt to shut up people of color. (Additionally, the teacher seemed to have mysteriously forgotten about King's statements on poverty, police brutality, the disproportionate accessibility to education and basic resources, etc.)

Once a black student came to me nearly in tears, after a teacher had referred to the class as her "slaves". When I spoke to her about the student's claim she rolled her eyes and couldn't believe that our society had become so politically correct. She clearly could not see that a descendent of slaves would not prefer to be referred to as such.

Another teacher referred to materials an experiment demonstrating surface tension as "we were the pepper and the soap was a negro." She then chuckled and had to defend herself by saying that she "wasn't racist". She later pointed out about a black friend at her wedding, as if this gave her some kind of "get out of jail free" card to make such disgusting comments, although she later added that she was tired about hearing about "blacks matter".

White educators: We need to confront our privilege. We need to reject white fragility. We need to have honest and frank discussions about our students and in the communities where we teach. We need to confront our biases, however unconscious we may be of them. We have to admit that we live in a system that benefits us and harms people of color. If we do not do these things, we need to leave the classroom.

White teacher fragility is racial student violence.



Friday, April 29, 2016

Why I No Longer Have Silent Sustained Reading In My Classroom



 
Is reading the skill, as many researchers have asserted? Absolutely.
 
During my first year of teaching reading I gave students twenty to thirty minutes of Silent Sustained Reading (SSR) time per day. The vast majority of teachers did this, so why shouldn't I? It made a lot of sense; if reading is the skill, should not students have significant time to practice it? 30 minutes per day, almost 180 days per year. There was no way that my students would not improve their comprehension.

But successful SSR means that other factors must be in place as well. Reading Specialist Mark Peddington notes that SSR is based on the following assumptions:

  • Reading is a skill which improves with practice. 
  • Students should be allowed to select their own books to read. 
  • SSR is best accomplished within the classroom with the teacher as a silent reading model.
  • SSR should not include instructional accountability.

Let's look at these common assumptions, many of which I have made.
 
1) Reading is a skill that improves with practice. We constantly hear that "practice makes perfect." We tell our students about how many shots Michael Jordan had to miss in order to become the greatest basketball player of all time. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell emphasizes "the 10,000 hour rule" and how the world's greatest achieved their goals only with dedicated hours and hours of work.

Subconsciously, we can begin to assume that students will not only internalize these attitudes, but will improve dramatically in their reading comprehension. Yet we forget that so many of our struggling readers have incredible degrees of learned helplessness; they don't want to shoot three pointers, but are comfortable with continuing to shoot the same shots that they've always been able to make from a close range.
 
One of my favorite reading books is Kyline Beers' When Kids Can't Read, where she introduces the concepts of independent and dependent readers. The former push their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), make connections, inferences, and essentially persist until they comprehend the text in front of them. The latter struggle and simply cannot meet these challenges.
 
Do you remember an extremely challenging text that you encountered at some point in school? For me it was hands-down The Odyssey. I remember feeling so lost, so hopeless, and just that there was no way I could comprehend this epic poem. I gave up. I could sit in front of Homer's epic for hours, yet it would not improve my comprehension because I was so lost.

I mentioned Vygotsky because his assertions seem to have taken a back seat to the trendy but often misunderstood concept of rigor. In urban classrooms, we are constantly hearing about rigor and its merits and how it is the key in transforming the "achievement gap."

Is rigor important? Absolutely. But too often educators neglect ZPD which makes the implementation of rigor futile. If I taught first grade, it would be rigorous to expect them to complete college-level calculus problems, right? Rigor must be realistic and attainable.

Reading cannot be imroved simply by practice. Texts must be appropriately rigorous and we need effective assessments to demonstrate comprehension and higher-level thinking.

2) Students should be allowed to select their own books to read. This is counterintuitevly, perhaps one of the most misunderstood concepts with SSR and student choice.

One of the presumtions of this assertion that I strongly agree with is that students need to be reading engaging texts. This is one of the keys in transforming dependent readers in addition to numerous reading strategies. This can change student's perception of reading from a chore to an enjoyable activity.

But things become a little more complicated with SSR.

When students choose their own books, it can be difficult to monitor is the text is rigorously appropriate. Many teachers (including myself) have used differentiated book bins based on lexility. However, we are now seeing that lexile has its flaws. For example, Diary of a Wimpy Kid has a higher lexility than The Book Thief. Pedagogy is shifting away from lexile towards text complexity. Despite programs such as ThinkCERCA taking the next steps, there is still much research that needs to be done not only on what designates a "complex text", but also how to assess students, texts, and correlate the data.

In addition to the complications with lexility, students have little to no effective accountability for SSR. Instead, text-dependent questions for a close read can give teacher's a much better perspective on where the student is at and where they need to go.

3) SSR is best accomplished within the classroom with the teacher as a silent reading model. One area in which I am in agreement with proponents of SSR is that during SSR, the teacher should either be in small-group instruction with students modeling strategies and/or developing skills, or the teacher should be silently reading themselves. During any periods of independent reading in class, these are paramount for effective instruction.

Instructors should also use "guided release of responsibility" pedagogy and model how to mark text (I), have guided practice where students mark text and/or respond independelty (we), and then give students individual practice (you). If your class contains dependent readers (hint: it does), reenforcing comprehension skills should be consistent.

But if the teacher is simply reading to themselves (as in my old classroom with SSR), students are not benefitting. We have no evidence to show that students are even reading or utilizing components of metacognition. This brings to the most effective argument against SSR:

4) SSR should not include instructional accountability. "Assessment, analysis, action", as Paul Bambrick-Santoyo puts it, are the keys to student mastery. In my Cold Call post, I emphasized how important informal assessments and how they can lead to 1) a rough idea of the student's ability and 2) effective differentiated instruction.

Without instruction accountability, we are not only missing these things, but we do not know if the 30 minutes are being used effectively. I used to call SSR "IDR", Indepent Daily Reading. I had daily IDR time. The following year a former student told me that his friends and himself referred to IDR as "I Don't Read". Essentially, without some kind of assessment (however informal it may be), we have no idea if how the students are progressing relative to their ZPD.

Instructional time in a classroom can be our most valuable asset. When used effectively, students can master challenging concepts at rates we could have never predicted. Thus, if reading is the skill, seconds are the tool. Every second counts. I believe so strongly in cold calling because it utilizes this concept.

Am I arguing that SSR is a waste of time? Not necessarily, but it has great potential to be. Even if we are working with small groups of students, we don't know how the rest of the class is engaging with their text. While I believe in sticky notes and double-entry journals, I realized that these can only go so far. These should be used when students are assigned complex texts in class with proper scaffolding, differentiation, and text-dependent questions or performance tasks, but they should not be used as a check for understanding. They are the means, not the end. Thus, we need to maximize instructional ability in our classrooms, and often times SSR does the opposite.
 
Can removing SSR on a daily basis and replace it with authentic teaching help improve reading comprehension and higher-level skills? Yes. Let's remove our opinions of standardized testing for a minute and observe some data. During my first year as a reading teacher with 30 daily minutes of SSR, 59% of my students met or exceeded their NWEA goal. The following year after removing SSR, 76% of my students met or exceeded their goal (or projected RIT for ELL students, 72% if you doe not count those students). And while the bias and flaws of standardized testing cannot be denied, it is nonetheless a reality that many neighborhood schools in Chicago have been closed down due to test scores. Regardless of our (valid) concerns regarding these tests, it is a reality we must confront.

But more important than the "data" was how much I saw my students grow. Because I had thirty extra minutes a day with them, I really pushed them to be able to think critically and question the world around them. The second year (reading) class was not only able to develop higher-level literacy skills, but they were able to think in ways that my other class could not. (To be fair, there were many other variables that helped me to surpass the previous year, especially cohesive unit development based on Understanding by Design. Nonetheless, I strongly believe that eliminating daily SSR was a critical factor in raising the rigor of my classroom.)

Eliminating SSR and replacing it with high quality differentiated instruction with frequent checks for understanding is what we should be doing. It is not the end but the means to improving the learning that occurs in our classrooms. As teachers, we need to pragmatically evaluate how we spend every second in our classrooms. While it has been a traditional part of reading classrooms, it must be done with guidance, support, and proper differentiation. If it's not, we are simply wasting our students' time. And they deserve better.